THE WORLD’S GREATEST ART EVENT AND HOW TO SURVIVE IT

THE GUARDIAN JULY 2006

There are few things upon which I am qualified to express an opinion. I have no interest in sport, and only last night was shamed by a Bulgarian mini-cab driver who could not belive I didn’t know the World Cup was about to start. I cannot understand electricty, its meaning, or its practice. I have no skills in the areas of animal husbandry or agriculture, and my misguided adventures in world of farming ended in bankruptcy and a criminal conviction. I have no expertise in matters of the heart. But this Summer will mark the eighteenth time I have worked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so when broadsheet newspapers and inflight magazines make their annual requests for 1000 words on “the world’s greatest arts event and how to survive it!”, I know I am, in this one area at least, entitled to speak, even if what I say becomes increasingly desperate.

When I first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987, Edinburgh was a city where it made sense to stage a Fringe Festival. It was easy to understand how the previous thirty years had seen the city become the vast granite teat of the arts, drawing thousands of impoverished performers every year to suckle its poisonous opiated gall. Edinburgh was cheap, and so were we. Most people involved in the fringe lose money, and our arrangements reflected that. We slept in sleeping bags on the floors of empty assembly halls, and ate the city’s plentful supply of inexpensive fried foods, baked potatoes, and old, rotten shortbread stolen under cover of night from the bins behind the tourist tea-shops at the cobbled foot of the Royal Mile. And, as our accomodation had no running water, we washed in Infirmary Street Public Baths, where rows of cubicles compensated for the fact that many of the citizens of the Scottish capital still didn’t have their own baths or showers.

Today, Edinburgh is the last place you would encourage thousands of already broke would-be artists to come and spend a month losing money. Partly due to the profile of the fringe itself, the city’s stock has risen, and its affected and vain inhabtants now boast of having running water in their own homes. Consequently, Edinburgh is now a costly place to stay. Today, haggling is now frowned upon in supermarkets and chemists, when only twenty years ago it was complusary, and it’s easier to find a costly capuccino on South Bridge Street than a ten bob fish supper. Don’t look for Infirmary Street Baths either, where many of today’s top stars once cleaned themselves. It’s boarded up now, home only to rats and memories. Thus, where once the joy of staging one of an estimated 1500 shows that take place daily in Edinburgh each August would have cost you an arm and a leg, now it will cost you all your limbs, the limbs of any surviving releatives, and those of your unborn children.

Understand this. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the greatest annual arts event in the world. Gripers and snipers who say it is a trade fair should visit the Montreal Comedy Festival if they want to see art reduced to commerce. The Edinburgh Fringe is a vast village fete, run on goodwill, naivete, hope, compromise and booze. When Annie Griffin’s disappointingly cynical satire Festival used an American Experimental Theatre group handing out turf to audiences as an example of the fringe’s preposterous nature, it missed the point. To the pure in heart there can be nothing finer or more moving than to find oneself being subjected to something sincere yet also utterly ill-conceived in a school hall somewhere in the middle of the afternoon.

Sure, the Fringe has its faults, the principal one being the Perrier Awards for Comedy. It’s sickening and indefensible to see comedians co-operating with a bottled water business owned by Nestle, who regularly top lists of unethical companies, and the amount of press coverage generated by the scheme always overshadows other aspects of the Fringe. And it’s true to say that the way TV executives see the Fringe as a one-stop-shop for scooping up new talent can lead to strange decisions being made in the hot-house atmosphere. But these problems are just scum floating on the surface of an otherwise largely unpolluted sea, so vast that it may seem impossible for you, as a punter or a performer, to navigate it.

If you are attending the Fringe for the first time as a performer, accept that nothing practical will come of it. You are in competition with literally 1000’s of other shows. In paying for your slot in the fringe programme, and renting your venue and a place to stay, you have already spent more than you can ever realistically hope to recoup, especially as the average fringe audience is, honestly, three people. I lost money for the first fifteen years I visited the fringe, but was able psychologically, to offset the experience as invaluable research and development. You are statistically unlikely to be reviewed, or discovered. But you will discover things about yourself and whatever it is you imagine you want to do by going to see absolutely everything you can, making connections with other performers, and arguing with them late into the night. The plays, performance art, and stand-up that I saw in my first few fringes burned so deeply into my brain that I know I’m still ripping them off to this day.

If you are attending the Fringe for the first time as a punter, how I envy you that first realisation of how utterly fantastic it is. But accept that the Fringe is unknowable. For a month this impossible matrix is assembled, never to be repeated, and if you saw ten shows a day all August, you would still only have explored a quarter of it. Comedy has colonised the evenings, where you’ll be able to see people you may have heard of in intimate spaces, but the long days stretch out packed with amazing things that you can easilly afford to take a chance on. Go and see anything at Aurora Nova at Saint Stevens, the home of international physical theatre, where even a flawed production will fascinate on some level. Creep through the endless claustrophobic tunnels of the Underbelly, a former charnell house, with its impossible mix of fringe names and unknown new talent. Throughout the city, you will see performances by people you have never heard of, that better anything else you have ever seen, and your childish faith in absolute justice will be shattered. But press on. Wear stout shoes to defeat the Escher drawing dimensions of the split level city. Keep moving, keep moving. There are hundreds of venues and any one could be your favorite. Eat a hearty breakfast. Do not waste time sleeping. And take a peak through every door.

Sometime in the mid-90’s, I walked into an archway near Waverly station in the small hours and watched an American man eat a whole jar of mayonnaise and then vomit it into a perfect circle to a backing track. Next, Nigel Kennedy took the stage with the comedian John Maloney, who accompanied the violinist on his bodhran for half an hour or so to an audience of thirty people or so in a completely unprepared performance. The event was not listed anywhere. I don’t remember paying anything. Did I dream it? Or was it just a manifestation of that unidentifiable, seemingly indestructible, wonder, the spirit of the fringe?